The biggest of Musk's warning signs, for me, was the hype. Hype can drown out valid criticism. When the hype is big enough, valid criticism ends up being drowned out by rage based, critical rhetoric that's in a screaming match with proponents.

(The worst part about being hype averse is that I can end up averse to legitimately exciting things.)

It's consistent with believing that AI is the future -- if a company doesn't perform really well, it loses that race. And if the userbase they piss off is also the userbase that's skeptical about AI, then they're not pissing off anyone that's relevant to the company winning.

Downside: Pissing off users is gross.

Which doesn't answer your question at all, but it is the metric they'll pay attention to. And it is the the thing that actually addresses the underlying problem.

> You don't have to support

This isn't just a kernel thing. Expecting volunteers to dump time into compliance is ridiculous. Not because they oppose the idea, but because huge swaths of the internet run on people doing something for free -- and they'll just do something else if governments begin threatening them.

Europe realized this with their new infosec liability regulations. If you're giving your labor away, you're not liable for your software; if you're making money off your software, step up and do better. Maybe California and the others should learn more from the EU.

Streamer doxing.

Literally just being trans.

HIV fear mongering.

Illegal fuckery with your insurance rates.

Employment discrimination.

Stalking.

Racial discrimination.

Can you imagine trying to fully trust a mental health professional today? A patient can't see a therapist's notes, but they sure as hell can be breached.

There is zero LEGITIMATE use for your breached health data.

People accuse veterinarians of being in it for the money, the same day another owner decides to euthanize their dog because they don't want it anymore. While an angry owner on social media is rallying pitchforks over something that the vet can't even respond to due to privacy standards.

I have no sympathy for PE that's wandering around our lives, destroying the actual purpose of businesses to extract profit from everyone they can.

And I fully acknowledge that the FSF isn't and will never be perfect.

It reduces profit.

This is not true.

That sounds like profit motivated negligence, and it sounds like a standard justification for why Europe is going to hold companies liable.

Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.

PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.

Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.

But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.

I agree with you on principle, but I don't think it's straightforward as your point states.

There is no loud, moderate voice. It makes me very tired of the blasting rhetoric that invades _every_ space.

> for us to be able to compute them all

It's that if you pick a real at random, the odds are vanishingly small that you can compute that one particular number. That large of a barrier to human knowledge is the huge leap.

Cable news was ramping up sensationalism -- including polarization -- before the internet was a household thing.

Social media gave the businesses real-time feedback of how to drive up engagement. So they amplify what keeps people engaged, which means leaning heavily on anger and divisiveness.

Also, stop blaming your damn users.

But that doesn't even overwrite the visible drive space; you can do a simple PoC to demonstrate that Windows won't get to all the mapped blocks. And that still hasn't gotten to the overprovisioned blocks and wear leveling issues that the article references.

You could use the BIOS or whatever CLI tool to tell the drive to chuck its encryption key, but are you sure that tool meets whatever compliance requirements you're beholden to? Are you sure the drive firmware does?

So they went with paying a company to shred the drives. All of them. It's disgustingly wasteful.